The present invention relates to portal pages and web portals for accessing multiple portal pages and more particularly to detachable and reattachable portal pages.
A portal is a point of access to data and applications that provides a unified and personalized view of information and resources. Typically, a portal is implemented as one or more portal pages on a website. Portal pages can integrate many elements, such as live data feeds, static information, multimedia presentations and similar content. Currently, within a portal environment, the purpose of a portal page in to organize and contain a given set of portlets. Portlets are reusable components that may provide access to applications, web-based content, and other resources, such as the live data feeds, static information and multimedia presentations, as mentioned above. Because of the integrated nature of portal pages, a user does not have the ability to view and interact with multiple pages at the same time. FIG. 1 is an example of a portal environment 100 in which a portal page 102 identified by a tab 104 labeled “My Finances” is currently being displayed or presented to a user. Other portal pages that may be accessed or activated through the portal environment 100 are identified by their corresponding tabs, such as “Documents” tab 106, “Welcome” tab 108, “My Work” tab 110, “My Newsroom” tab 112 and “My Star Trek” tab 114. The portal pages can typically only be switched from one another via the use of the integrated tabs 104-114 that may be located at the top of each corresponding portal page 100, such as that illustrated in FIG. 1. Only one portal page may be viewed on a user's desktop or active at any given time.
Additionally, other problems may occur as a result of the tight coupling of portal pages within a portal environment. One problem is that users do not have the ability to refresh multiple pages because only one page can be viewed or active at any given time. Another problem is related to dynamic updates for a portal page. Updates, such as alerts or the like, cannot be surfaced or brought to a user's attention because only one portal page may be viewed or active on a user's desktop at any given moment. Further, portlets on separate portal pages cannot communicate with one another.